What if I told you that everything you thought you knew about measuring good marketing is wrong? Get ready: Lead generation is not the way to measure a successful marketing effort for your business. In fact, lead generation (at least the way most people think about it) is arguably the least vital part of a sustainable, healthy marketing engine.
For several years now, in an effort to prove ROI on marketing spend, businesses have been treating marketing as nothing more than a lead manufacturing engine. You build a website, run some ads, get an email marketing tool, buy a list, input creative campaigns, measure the right metrics, and pump out happy, shiny leads.
Unfortunately, this linear idea of hyper-measurable marketing has some serious flaws. Namely, it prioritizes short-term returns over long-term viability and attempts to reduce the complexity of human behavior, thoughts, and emotions to predictable blobs of cash.
It’s time to stop measuring the success of your marketing engine by the number of “leads” it generates — especially when a lot of those leads ARE TOTAL GARBAGE. Instead, businesses looking to build long-term, sustainable growth should focus on building strong brand awareness as a necessary lead-in to advertising and demand generation.
Uncovering the Lies in Your Lead Generation Metrics
Eighty-five percent of B2B marketers say lead gen is their single most important goal. That’s unfortunate. Believe it or not, marketing has never been about generating leads. It’s all about growth. In fact, 83 percent of global CEOs believe that marketing should be responsible for almost all of their company’s growth agenda. In other words, CEOs don’t want marketing to produce leads; they want growth. And these two objectives are held together by the most fragile of threads.
Don’t get me wrong; leads are important. But leads aren’t nuggets of gold mined by data-driven algorithms using a glob of pixels and cookies (which won’t be around much longer anyway). They’re an organic, naturally occurring resource that’s spawned by creating amazing experiences and growing a spectacular brand. When you measure your success with metrics, you’re restricting your entire marketing agenda down to whether or not it produces leads through tangible and hyper-measurable criteria. But what about all of those complex emotional triggers and nuanced intangibles that we, as humans, feel, experience, and consume every day? You can’t measure those with an algorithm.
Let’s say you put out an amazing blog with a CTA. You can measure how many people visit your website, click the CTA, and eventually convert. But what happens if someone reads the blog without clicking, remembers your brand name and CTA due to digesting your amazing content, and talks to a friend who’s in the market for a similar service about your brand based on memory. You can’t measure that conversion. The same thing goes with events. After an event, you have a friendly chat with someone, and they eventually discuss your brand with some of their co-workers. You can’t measure those conversions. The best algorithms and smartest cookies can’t account for in-store purchases, WoM, brand growth, and cross-channel lift.
When we take this conversation to the highest level and discuss pure branding, things get even messier. Where and when did you first hear about Coca-Cola? We’re guessing you have no idea. But you’ve probably purchased Coke. How in the world does Coke measure that? Well… they don’t. Instead, Coke’s marketing team has spent years cultivating a brand and spreading awareness. They didn’t spend all of their time, resources, and energy solely focusing on measurable channels like social media, and they certainly didn’t build a marketing ecosystem that only relies on measurability. Instead, they pursued the invisible thread. Coke built a brand. Those marketers delivered emotional and exceptional experiences through a combination of channels, strategies, and very human moments.
Awareness, Brand, and Measurability: Sifting Through the Chaos
For the past 5 years, marketers have been marching to a quote attributed to Peter Drucker: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Let’s ignore the fact he never actually said this for a moment. This quote is, without a doubt, the single worst statement in marketing. I could forgive the quote for being wrong (which it is), but it’s hard to forgive this quote for being wrong and popular.
Did you know that over half of ad impressions are fraudulent? What about the fact that as many as 94 percent of clicks you receive are bots? Focusing on measurability can cripple your company. Not only does it convince you to invest in easy-to-measure platforms while ignoring growth verticals, but it can trick your entire marketing team into believing that growth and measurability are synonymous. They’re not. In fact, the two single biggest components of growth (i.e., awareness and brand) are mostly intangible.
Let’s take a quick look at a few statistics about your customers:
- 90 percent of customers admit that brand authenticity is a key factor in their purchasing decision.
- 81 percent of customers buy based on trust
- Brand consistency across all channels bumps revenue by 33%
- 71 percent of customers buy from brands that share their values
Notice anything? You can’t measure authenticity, trust, consistency, and values. They’re intangible. Yet, they’re probably the biggest driver of conversions. In fact, emotional resonance alone contributes to 50 percent of your overall brand value.
The way customers feel when they see your company is huge. It takes 5 to 7 impressions before a customer can even recall your business name. It takes countless impressions before they begin to associate your brand with your product or service, and even more before they feel an emotional connection to what you do.
In other words, the secret to marketing isn’t to dump a bunch of money into hyper-measurable channels. It’s to consistently create content, spread awareness, and create with those around you beyond the transactional aspects of your business. For some companies, branding and awareness can be the difference between growth and stagnation.
Piranhas, Sharks, and Branding
Remember the old chicken and egg adage? Which came first, the brand recognition or the growth? Are big brands recognizable because they’re big? Or are they big because they’re recognizable? I could easily argue the latter. Think about how many tech companies became household names overnight in the past decade alone. They didn’t sit around for countless hours tweaking campaigns to get the pitch-perfect ROI. They built a brand, and they battled for awareness in their contested markets.
You should too!
Small companies can’t afford to put their eggs in the measurability basket. To beat your competition, you need to be more recognizable. Awareness and branding build momentum. They make cold calls lukewarm. They turn 20-minute sales pitches into 5-second confirmations. And they transform top-funnel prospects into mid-funnel prospects before they even climb into your funnel.
Better yet, awareness and branding create trust. And you can’t earn trust with simple ads (the opposite is usually true). Do you want customers to believe in your company before they make the purchase? Are you looking to build lifetime customers and boost WoM? Stop focusing on measurability! Yes, metrics are still important. And some campaigns absolutely need to be measured. But measurable campaigns shouldn’t consume your entire marketing budget. If they do, you’re missing out on the single most critical part of the marketing ecosystem: branding.
Are You Ready to Build A Better Brand?
Too often, marketers misunderstand the idea of marketing. It’s not simply a conversion tool. Marketing should harness the best parts of your business, project them outward, and use them to create spectacular experiences for customers, prospects, and people. Are you tired of seeing high-ROI marketing campaigns without seeing amazing growth? We can help. At Brand Syntax, we help software companies convince, convert, and brand. Our goal isn’t to show you a chart of metrics and claim victory. We want you to grow.
Are You Ready To Get Started on a New Marketing Plan?
Are you a B2B software brand looking for a specialized agency that keeps its client list small and focused? We create you-centric strategies, and we’re ready to help you create a strategy to help your software stand out this year.
